Bash history not saved after closing terminal

bash history ubuntu-gnome bash-history

50,383

Solution 1

It may be that your .bash_history doesn't belong to your user. Check the permissions of the file and if you're not the owner, change it:

sudo chown yourusername:yourusername ~/.bash_history

Solution 2

First type following command

shopt -s

to check weather histappend command is 'on' or 'off' If it is off then type following command to append history

history -a

If you want to save history with every new prompt run following command

export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'

For more information see this link

50,383

Deepal

NodeJS Fan and an Information Security Enthusiast

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Deepal over 1 year

I recently replaced my Ubuntu 14.04 installation with Ubuntu Gnome (which comes with Gnome DE). But I noticed that bash history is not saved once the terminal session is closed. Once I close a terminal session and open a new one, and run the command history it does not show anything other than the history command itself. Is there any way to solve this issue?

Thank you
- JBallin almost 6 years
  
  did you figure this out? if not, paste your profile/rc here for review.
Deepal almost 10 years

histappend is 'on'. Can't figure out what's going on. :/
Chinmaya B almost 10 years

I think some pipe connecting to history file is broken ,because if from terminal history is append then only it can be case of broke pipe try reparing or reinstalling system if you can
Klik over 9 years

Worked for me. Curious how that happened though.
Chris about 9 years

Same here. I also wonder why that happened?
The Guy with The Hat over 6 years

Shouldn't you set the group as well, with sudo chown yourusername:yourusername ~/.bash_history?
Peter over 5 years

Boombaa ! I take this moral from the story: "When such basic facility fails (and by default is ON), then most likely this is due to famous "permissions: problem." :)
HCSF over 4 years

histappend isn't even listed in the output of shopt -s even tho $HISTSIZE and $HISTFILESIZE are set properly. Idea? Thanks!
Russell Fulton almost 4 years

This fixed the problem for me too. I strongly suspect that sudo -s was the problem but it does not happen every time. I note that -s leaves the home dir as the original. I was using that before my history vanished.
J. Doe almost 4 years

it happened to me once. There was blank permissions block. chmod 0644 .bash_history solved the problem "-rw-r--r--"